If, in decades past, political radicals could plausibly claim to be merely rearranging or updating the furniture in the house of Western civilisation, it is now quite clear they are knocking down walls and making off with the roof.
We might expect an organic groundswell of sympathy for conservative principles, therefore. But sympathy for principles is not the same thing as support for political parties.
During one of the debates leading up to Spain’s recent general election, VOX leader Santiago Abascal echoed Matt Walsh in asking his opponents, the heads of the Socialist party and Sumar, what their definition of a woman is. Given their spearheading of the country’s new transgender law, according to which one may more or less claim whatever gender identity one wants, the question was pertinent.
They did not answer, however. What is surprising is that he didn’t either. Abascal said something like, “We are at an impasse.” But we are never at an impasse. Beauty is not at an impasse with perversion.
Given VOX’s striking subsequent underperformance, the episode may be taken to be instructive. It is not enough to ask questions and allow the postmodern Left to expose the absurdity of its program. One has to provide an answer and illustrate why the opposite answer is wrong.
In the case of transgenderism, the rhetoric around “gender affirming care” sidelines parents and communities as potentially dangerous influences that might lead the young away from their true selves and, therefore, into depression. The practical consequences are to make people into lifelong thralls to the medical establishment.
In fact, this is the through-line of what we call “woke” politics, from the transgender agenda to mass migration: decreasing social cohesion in order to increase social control. Emphasising this dichotomy between community cohesion and external control is key to effective political messaging.
“Woke” politics is now emerging as a very specific model, where large funding entities incentivise business and government to further ideological projects whose end is radical social atomization. This is sometimes optimistically termed “stakeholder capitalism,” formulated in terms of so-called ESG (Environment, Social, and Governance) objectives.
The idea seems to be to get governments to care more about what they can get from these funding entities than about their citizens, just as businesses are to focus on the capital injections offered by them rather than on their customers’ wants. Thus the “go woke, go broke” meme, which doesn’t really manifest in the real world with all the force that we would expect if there weren’t vast amounts of money out there for those willing to push the party line.
Of course, markets have always included an element of political engineering, for good or ill. Concerning modern economies, these partly came about among pre-industrial populations through the forceful abolition of the commons and a quite conscious promotion of destitution, forcing the artisan to become a factory worker. But modernity brought positive developments as well, and, in any case, the present ESG-funder conquest of politics represents a new, suffocatingly tight turn of the screw.
Against “woke,” “stakeholder” crony capitalism, then, a coherent conservatism should promote the real interests of stakeholders (society at large) through its own understanding of the market, for which it might appropriate terms like property-owning democracy. G.K. Chesterton’s pithy description of his own thoughts on economics is ever-relevant: “The problem of capitalism is not too much capitalism, but too few capitalists,” that is, too few owners of capital (home, business, etc.).
Regarding the “real interests of stakeholders,” we may point to how the “S” in ESG is generally explained in terms of inclusion, diversity, and equality without emphasising the importance of trust between citizens and common cultural frameworks, for example, or the importance of having citizens feel a sense of ownership over their community. Diversity is promoted, not identity; inclusion is encouraged in the sense of access to services, not ownership of capital.
In part, conservatism is simply the rediscovery of those practices that render communities able to perpetuate themselves without constant outside interference and supplementation. It is the politics that emerge when control is not the priority; the politics that does not seek to break down community in order that its parts, including the individuals that comprise it, might be more easily got at.
One litmus test for determining where one falls involves the thought experiment of what to do when there is more demand for labour than supply. If one’s answer is to import workers so that those who want labour cheap may get it rather than to allow the price of labour (salaries) to rise, then one believes in a single global market justifiably mobilising resources (human or otherwise) whenever called for from a distant land. Western governments generally accept the economic arguments requiring mass migration. The disempowerment of the local workforce here is a major instance of the general disempowerment of citizens and consumers discussed above.
The opposite view is that market mechanisms are subordinate to borders and should be stewarded to good ends principally within a political body, as my metabolism operates within my body. I will develop this point in a future essay.
To conclude, focusing on current developments as an elite project meant to disempower consumers and citizens makes for a politically transversal discourse that may appeal to the political orphans of a Left that no longer cares about the working class as well as to those anchored in classical liberalism.
